


the boy who cried fire

by punkrockbadger



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Fire, Gen, Nature Magic, dyslexic character, neuroatypical character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-07
Updated: 2014-08-07
Packaged: 2018-02-12 05:49:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2097966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/punkrockbadger/pseuds/punkrockbadger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“The sky is the wrong color.” He says aloud, looking around, and the adults continue with their conversation as if he’s said nothing. </p><p>Because, essentially, he has.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the boy who cried fire

Hugo is named after a Muggle author his mother loved as a child.

“My first friend”, she’d said, when he asked how he’d gotten his name, pointing to a thick novel that holds the place of honor on her desk, king among all the legal dictionaries that litter the surface. The letters take awhile to make sense of, but he recognizes his name at the end. Victor Hugo, he notices, and the book’s title has accents in it. Must be French, he muses. “Granted, he was hardly a friend, seeing he’d been dead for years by the time I read his work, but it felt like a friend.”

Hugo nods and pretends he understands.

Books have never held the same appeal for him that they do for Rosie, but he knows what his mother means by something seeming like a friend when you’ve got none of the real kind. 

The animals are that way for Hugo. The animals, the plants and the bits of metal that his grandfather fiddles with in the shed. They respond to him in a way that people don’t.

People tend to not respond at all, when Hugo speaks.

Hugo smiles, wide enough to blind the sun, and runs until he is too tired to remember that people call him special behind his back, and counts down the days until The Trip.

[x]

The Trip is a yearly journey to the Forest of Dean that his parents, Uncle Harry, Aunt Ginny and all the kids make, and Uncle Harry always takes them along to see the pool where Dad saved his life for the millionth time. The story always makes Hugo feel warm inside, like he will someday find a friend who will save him from himself. 

But wishes are folly, he’s learned that much from the few books he has cracked open, and wanting something to happen doesn’t mean that it will. Hugo will always be Hugo, the relative everyone looks at with a shred of pity badly disguised as curiosity or concern, the child everyone regards as just a little bit out of luck. He has heard the whispers, heard the offhand comments, heard the hushed conversations when he is out with his parents.

People wonder how the son of two heroes, one of whom saved the whole world with her affinity for books, could be like him. Unwilling (unable) to make sense of the letters in the tomes his mother and sister pore over like they are the source of life. The letters float away like clouds, twisting into shapes like the little green garden snakes that curl around Hugo’s fingers when he goes out into the tall grass, and his mother looks a little short of disappointed when she shuts the book in front of him, smiling tiredly as she tells him to go on and play for a bit.

His father is vaguely sympathetic in his own strange way, dismissing Hugo with a few pats on the head and an empty promise that he will grow up to surprise them all, but Hugo has known for a long time that he cannot trust in his parents’ stories to influence his own. Perhaps he may have a spark of brilliance hidden deep within his soul, like his father, but if it is there, it is remarkably well hidden.

“The sky is the wrong color.” He says aloud, looking around, and the adults continue with their conversation as if he’s said nothing. 

Because, essentially, he has. 

Hugo is the kid that says weird things every once in awhile, the kid that makes spectacles of himself and others. 

Hugo is the kid with the strange observations that people shake their heads at, the kid who talks to animals and expects them to talk back. 

No one tries to understand what he has to say, least of all those who lay claim to the precious label of family.

No one listens to the boy who cries wolf, if he says the words enough, and Hugo supposes he did all the crying wolf he was allowed before he knew what it meant. 

The birds swarm overhead, all flying far, far away to their fairy tale, and Hugo watches them leave, waving absently as they caw at each other. The great race, he thinks, as they careen across the sky. Something special.

This Trip will not be at all the same as any of the others, he muses, and asks permission to go deeper into the forest.

James, all wild eyes and scraped knees, groups all the rest of the cousins up to go to the pool with Uncle Harry, and Hugo nods through promises to be safe if he’s going off on his own before standing stock still as his mother casts her normal tracking charm on him. It’s for his safety, he reminds himself, as he has a terrible habit of forgetting where he is and why he is there, and part of that is getting horribly, terribly lost every once in awhile. 

It’s okay, he told her once, the trees help me find my way home. 

She’d laughed in his face and told him she’d cast a stronger tracking charm next time, not to worry.

Lily eyes Hugo carefully, always one to know when he is feeling unsettled, and he shrugs, straightening the neck of his dark green sweatshirt before running off in the opposite direction, in search of the center of the woods. The center of the woods always holds answers of some sorts, even if it’s just little patterns in the grass, and Hugo will find them.

He always has had an eye for patterns.

He asks the trees for directions until they lead him to the right clearing, a ring of trees surrounding bare grass burnt brown by the harsh sunlight, and he spins and spins until he falls down, whispering the lyrics to Ring Around the Roses before falling into the softest patch of grass. It forms a cushion around his head, shaping itself to his wild mass of curls without question, and Hugo falls in love with his magic again.

He is dizzy and euphoric and the world seems to bend to his will, making him glad, oh so glad, to be alive, but what is that smell?

His sense of smell has always been sharper than most, so he sits up, urgently brushing the dried grass from where it’s gotten caught on his sweater and pants, and runs off in the direction of the strange, strange smell.

And it’s only when he’s gotten close enough to feel the heat that he realizes what has happened.

The smell is smoke.

The Forest of Dean is on fire.

[x]

“Hugo!” The adults call, and he can hear them, but finds his lips gummed shut. He can’t tear them apart to answer, can’t call out for help, but he follows the trail that the trees are setting as the fire rushes towards him. It wants to swallow him up, he can tell by the way it crackles and grows, and it speaks to him in a primal growl as he runs, the shoelaces on his trainers slowly coming undone. “Hugo!”

He forces his dry lips apart and screams that he is here, that he is alive, and wonders if the world will hear him. If he is worth their notice now, finally, and he trips over the shoelaces that are flying right and left as he jumps over large branches and dry leaves in an effort to find his way home. The trees are silent now, he muses, as he quickly ties his shoelaces before starting to run again. 

He would be silent too, if he were facing death.

Anything you say can be used against you, at the end of the day, so isn’t the safest thing to do being quiet?

He is soaked to the bone by a jet of water aimed at the bush he has just run through and is quickly embraced by his parents, and the forest disappears as his mother folds him into her arms, as if the whole trip had been a dream after all.

They all appear in the grass outside The Burrow, dazed and smelling of fire, and Hugo mourns for the trees and leaves lost while everyone else groups together, brushing each other off and checking for injuries.

“The sky was the wrong color.” He says again, and the adults nod in agreement. “Red always means fire.”


End file.
